Collaboration

Members

  • Chair –  Jerome Coutant, Veoila Water Solutions & Technologies; Deputy Chair – Claude Metzdorf, Du Pont de Nemours
  • Other members were drawn from AMEC, Astrazeneca, BG Group, CB & I, CEL, Du Pont, Fluor, GroupCytek, Veoila Water, PWC and Fabricom.

Background to the Taskforce

The Collaboration Taskforce grew out of one of ECI’s most successful taskforce initiatives of recent years, the Futures Taskforce. The Collaboration Taskforce’s approach was based on an approach used by PWC in its 11th annual CEO survey in 2008 which highlighted the importance of collaboration in business performance. The Taskforce wanted to understand what collaboration meant to the engineering construction sector.

Aims and Activities of the Taskforce

The aim of the Taskforce was to understand what collaboration means to the engineering construction sector in five key areas:

  • The supply chain
  • The pursuit of talent and retaining people
  • Regulatory harmonisation
  • Addressing major global challenges
  • Access to new markets

The taskforce interviewed over twenty individuals in ECI member organisations. The sample included clients, EPCs and smaller contractors. The taskforce then analysed the responses in each of the five areas to understand collaboration in an engineering construction context.

What the Taskforce Discovered

Collaborating in the supply chain

  • The suitability of projects for collaboration does not lie in the characteristics of the product (e.g. complexity) but lies in having the right relationships in the project:-
  • Clients and EPCs understand alliancing differently
  • Trust is seen as  the most important prerequisite for collaboration

Collaborating to attract and retain talent

  • A wide variety of difficulties are identified in this kind of collaborative assignment: These include individual mobility, complexity of planning, cultural differences and managers unwilling to share good people.
  • With some exceptions, most organisations are collaborating extensively with universities in developing training:
  • No organisation reported developing training material collaboratively with any other engineering sector organisations.

Collaborating for regulatory harmonisation

  • A large amount of support exists for greater regulatory harmonisation, BUT…
  • No companies were currently involved in any regulation mitigation activities

Collaborating to face global challenges

  • ECI members are facing very different challenges BUT …
  • All respondents agree that the impact of global challenges has increased in the recession
  • ECI members’ opinions vary greatly  on whether collaboration can be used to solve these problems

Collaborating to access new markets

  • Collaboration is judged an effective way of entering new markets:
    • Collaboration with sister companies enabled the fulfilling of a ‘local content’ contract clause
    • Client organisations collaborated with other client organisations on a UK bio-ethanol project
    • Using collaboration in engineering in a region ultimately won the construction phase of a project
    • Collaboration with another EPC enabled a gas project in Kazakhstan
    • Collaboration with a specialist control organisation led to the award of a high speed link project

Recommendations for Change

On the basis of its finding, the Taskforce recommends that ECI  takes the following actions:

  • To review the tools that are available to ECI members to convert ‘soft ‘but very important factors such as trust, relationship strength into a quantifiable measures they can use to manage project relationships.
  • To understand how the new British Standard ( BS11000) soon to be an ISO standard entitled ‘Collaborative business relationships – a framework specification’ can be used by ECI members to enhance their performance
  • To help ECI members collaborate on the provision of continuing professional development to their workforces.
  • To run a series of workshops for young professional across ECI to use the combined expertise of ECI to help further their professional development.
  • To help ECI members who are small-to-medium sized enterprises to work effectively with universities
  • To create a group of cases showing how ECI members have used collaboration to enter new markets and to encourage people to share both good and bad experiences

The taskforce also recommends ECI members’ to take the following action:

  • To review the ways in which they currently attract young professionals especially in terms of using social networking approaches.

For further information on the Collaboration Taskforce or for a copy of the full report please contact Anu Khandelwal  (a.khandelwal@lboro.ac.uk)